A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. -/- Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to language. (...) Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy. (shrink)

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given (...) so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di FerrarisTom BaileyAlfredo Ferrarin, editor. Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di Ferraris. Pisa: ETS, 2006. Pp. 172. Paper, € 13.Maurizio Ferraris’ Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della Critica della ragion pura (Milan 2004) has been a notable success in the field of popular philosophical writing in Italy. With refreshing irreverence and wit, the book mounts a sustained attack on (...) the supposed confusions of Kant’s first Critique, and bemoans their influence on later philosophy. In particular, Ferraris [End Page 328] argues that by attempting to found the necessary features of experience on physics, Kant confuses experience and ontology with science and epistemology and arrives at the implausible conclusion that our experience and knowledge, and perhaps even the existence, of things depend on how our minds are structured. Unsurprisingly, Goodbye Kant! has provoked strong reactions from Kant scholars. Alfredo Ferrarin’s Congedarsi da Kant? collects four particularly considered responses, along with a reply from Ferraris himself.The book begins with Ferrarin’s contribution, which focuses on Ferraris’ claim that, for Kant, the sensible experience of an object necessarily requires a concept of that object. With reference to spatial intuition, the three-fold synthesis, and Kant’s example of a savage seeing a house for the first time, Ferrarin argues that Kant in fact defends the independence of intuition from concepts, such that intuition is possible and can provide certain cognitive results without our having any particular concept of what the object of intuition is. Ferrarin also insists that, in claiming that “[t]he I think must be able to accompany all my representations,” Kant considers having an experience to imply only the possibility—and not, as Ferraris claims, the necessity—of the experience being consciously thought, and that Kant considers imagination not as a “creative” psychological activity within experience, as Ferraris implies, but rather as a certain normative activity that experience presupposes. Instead of basing experience on physics, then, Ferrarin argues that Kant distinguishes experience from science and considers both to be made possible by certain general a priori forms of sensing and conceiving of objects.In the following article, Claudio La Rocca takes issue with Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project in the Critique. For La Rocca, Kant is concerned with the conditions under which discourses or experiences have sense for a subject, and, specifically, with how referring to empirical objects differs from referring to the objects of, say, hallucinations, aesthetic experiences, or moral reasoning. On La Rocca’s account, referring meaningfully to an object presupposes shared rules which identify that kind of object and distinguish it from others, and which are “spelled out” in experience even before being “read” conceptually. However, unlike the distinctions between kinds of empirical objects, the general distinction between empirical objects and objects of other discourses or experiences cannot itself be derived from experience, since experience presupposes it. Thus La Rocca presents Kant’s basic project as the identification of the a priori rules which distinguish empirical objects as such, rather than the idealist project attributed to him by Ferraris, that of showing how the existence or properties of such objects depend on the mind or how our experience of them depends on the concepts or scientific theories we have of them.Paolo Parrini adopts a slightly different approach by arguing that it is Ferraris, and not Kant, who fails to distinguish adequately between experience, ontology, and epistemology. In particular, Parrini insists that, rather than basing experience or ontology on science, as Ferraris claims, Kant aims to show that a priori concepts are necessary to distinguish the objective from the subjective in ordinary experience, and that Ferraris’ own realism naively ignores certain crucial distinctions between what is experienced, what exists, and what we know. Parrini thus undertakes to defend not only Kant, but also certain post-Kantians—and the logical empiricists in particular—against Ferraris’ criticisms.In the final response to Ferraris, Massimo Barale further questions Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project. By considering only the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, Barale insists that Ferraris treats the most elementary, and even preliminary, parts of Kant... (shrink)

This paper reformulates some of the questions raised by extended mind theorists from an enactive, life/mind continuity perspective. Because of its reliance on concepts such as autopoiesis, the enactive approach has been deemed internalist and thus incompatible with the extended mind hypothesis. This paper answers this criticism by showing (1) that the relation between organism and cogniser is not one of co-extension, (2) that cognition is a relational phenomenon and thereby has no location, and (3) that the individuality of a (...) cogniser is inevitably linked with the question of its autonomy, a question ignored by the extended mind hypothesis but for which the enactive approach proposes a precise, operational, albeit non-functionalist answer. The paper raises a pespective of embedded and intersecting forms of autonomous identity generation, some of which correspond to the canonical cases discussed in the extended mind literature, but on the whole of wider generality. In addressing these issues, this paper proposes unbiased, non-species specific definitions of cognition, agency and mediation, thus filling in gaps in the extended mind debates that have led to paradoxical situations and a problematic over-reliance on intutions about what counts as cognitive. (shrink)

Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle and theories of autopoiesis and enaction. Many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems. We critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misinterpretations of key enactive concepts. In particular, we notice a tendency to disregard the operational definition of autopoiesis and the distinction between a system’s structure and its organization. Other misreadings (...) concern the conflation of processes of self-distinction in operationally closed systems and Markov blankets. Deeper theoretical tensions underlie some of these misinterpretations. FEP assumes systems that reach a non-equilibrium steady state and are enveloped by a Markov blanket. We argue that these assumptions contradict the historicity of sense-making that is explicit in the enactive approach. Enactive concepts such as adaptivity and agency are defined in terms of the modulation of parameters and constraints of the agent-environment coupling, which entail the possibility of changes in variable and parameter sets, constraints, and in the dynamical laws affecting the system. This allows enaction to address the path-dependent diversity of human bodies and minds. We argue that these ideas are incompatible with the time invariance of non-equilibrium steady states assumed by the FEP. In addition, the enactive perspective foregrounds the enabling and constitutive roles played by the world in sense-making, agency, development. We argue that this view of transactional and constitutive relations between organisms and environments is a challenge to the FEP. Once we move beyond superficial similarities, identify misreadings, and examine the theoretical commitments of the two approaches, we reach the conclusion that far from being easily integrated, the FEP, as it stands formulated today, is in tension with the theories of autopoiesis and enaction. (shrink)

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming (...) as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the (...) enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care. (shrink)

Natural language conditionals seem to be subject to three logical requirements: they invalidate Antecedent Strengthening, they validate so-called Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents, and they allow for the replacement of logically equivalent clauses in antecedent position. Unfortunately, these requirements are jointly inconsistent. Conservative solutions to the puzzle drop Simplification, treating it as a pragmatic inference. I show that pragmatic accounts of Simplification fail, and develop a truthmaker semantics for conditionals that captures all the relevant data. Differently from existing truthmaker semantics, my (...) semantics extends, rather than replaces, standard possible worlds semantics. The main innovation is the notion of a truthmaker in play: this notion is cognitive, rather than metaphysical, and can be defined in a purely syntactic way. (shrink)

Knowing is an activity through which agents and world produce themselves. This is often expressed by the enactive claim that agents bring forth a world. I analyse this idea for different modes of agent–environment engagement: interactional, transactional, and constitutional. Something is produced in each case. Bringing forth a world is not only an epistemic but an ontological claim. Acts in their fine structure result from a process of fact production, or f/acts. F/acts co-emerge with their 'preconditions', e.g.intentions, affordances, across the (...) subject/object divide. F/acts define their inner temporality and affectivity, comprising both event and experience. A plurality of worlds is admitted in this enactive view, without entailing antirealism. We cannot bring forth just any world. World resistance organizes action and experience. I touch on the implications for objectivity and free will and discuss the primordiality of activity, community, and relationality. From a notion of groundlessness in early enactive work, I suggest that a participatory universe is better conceived as a meshwork of groundless grounds. (shrink)

Social factors have so far been neglected in embodied theories of perception despite the wealth of phenomenological insights and empirical evidence indicating their importance. I examine evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience and attempt an initial classification according to whether social factors play a contextual, enabling, or constitutive role in the ability to perceive objects in a detached manner, i.e. beyond their immediate instrumental use. While evidence of cross-cultural variations in perceptual styles and the influence of social cues on visual (...) attention could not be said to play more than a contextual role, other factors such as the intricate developmental links between dyadic and triadic interactions in infancy, as well as episodes of peer-learning in children, play enabling roles. A common element in these factors is the presence and resolution of interpersonal conflict. Detached object perception could not develop without these social factors. I argue, in addition, that social skills such as managing partial social acts which are addressed to and completed by others, linguistic mediation, makebelieve play, and the ability to control perspectival switches are constitutive -- i.e. are of the essence -- of the ability to see objects as present with a detached attitude. I discuss the prospects of incorporating such social elements into dynamical interpretations of the sensorimotor approach through the enactive notion of participatory sense-making. (shrink)

This paper investigates what happens when we merge two different lines of theorizing about counterfactuals. One is the comparative closeness view, which was developed by Stalnaker and Lewis in the framework of possible worlds semantics. The second is the interventionist view, which is part of the causal models framework developed in statistics and computer science. Common lore and existing literature have it that the two views can be easily fit together, aside from a few details. I argue that, on the (...) contrary, transplanting causal-models-inspired ideas in a possible worlds framework yields a new semantics. The difference is grounded in different algorithms for handling inconsistent information, hence it touches on issues that are at the very heart of a semantics for contrary-to-fact conditionals. Roughly, Stalnaker/Lewis semantics requires us to evaluate the consequent of a counterfactual at all closest antecedent-verifying possibilities. Causal-models-based semantics also does this, but in addition uses the information contained in the antecedent, together with background causal information, to shift what worlds count as closest. This makes systematically different predictions and generates a new logic. The upshot is that we have a new semantics to study, and a substantial theoretical choice to make. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: I contrast enactivist and ecological perspectives on some of the themes raised by the authors. I discuss some of their worries about the notion of sense-making and other epistemological aspects of enactivism.

The temporality of intentions and actions in situations of social interaction can sometimes be paradoxical. I argue that in these situations it may sometimes be possible to conceive of individual acts that can, in a strong sense, be intended retroactively. This could happen when the relational patterns in social interaction literally alter the virtual structure of a participant's past corporeal intentions resulting in an odd experience of having intended something all along without knowing it. I propose that this possibility should (...) be interpreted as more than just a narrowly epistemic phenomenon. Examining this claim involves clarifying the enactive perspective on intentionality, which I do here. The enactive approach rejects the model of a causal relation between intention and action for one of an intrinsic qualitative relation between the two as facets of sense-making. I develop this idea and compare it with Merleau-Ponty's Fundierung model of the mutual relation between corporeal and reflexive intentionality to show that co-regulated moves/affections during social interaction may modulate both arcs of this relation, creating the possibility of a re-signification that alters not the actuality but the virtual tendencies that preceded the social act. (shrink)

In December 2017, Law 219/2017, ‘Provisions for informed consent and advance directives’, was approved in Italy. The law is the culmination of a year-long process and the subject of heated debate throughout Italian society. Contentious issues are addressed in the law. What emerges clearly are concepts such as quality of life, autonomy, and the right to accept or refuse any medical treatment – concepts that should be part of an optimal relationship between the patient and healthcare professionals. The law maximizes (...) the value of the patient’s time to decide. Every patient is allowed to make choices for the present as well as for the future, conceived as a continuation of the present, and to decide what comes next, based on what he/she already knows. The law identifies three distinct but converging paths towards the affirmation of a care relationship based on reciprocal trust and respect: the possibility to consent to or refuse treatment, the shared care planning, and advance directives. The fundamental point to emerge from the new Italian law is that consensus is an essential connotation of the treatment relationship. Consensus is not limited to the acceptance/rejection of medical treatment but is ongoing. It is projected into the future through shared care planning and advance directives which act as tools for self-determination and the manifestation of the beliefs and preferences of persons unable to express their will. These principles are in line with the idea of appropriate care as evaluated from two different perspectives, one of scientific adequacy and the other commensurate with the individual’s resources, fragility, values, and beliefs. Surely, however, the new law is not the end of the matter on issues such as conscientious objection, which is deeply rooted within the Italian cultural and political debate. In this regard, healthcare institutions and policymakers will be called upon to develop and implement organizational policies aimed at the management of foreseeable conscientious objection in this field. (shrink)

Mascolo successfully defends a relational, developmental approach to emotions. I draw parallels between his perspective and the enactive approach, in particular with the concept of participa...

We examine the question of material agency as raised in material engagement theory (MET). Insofar as MET tends to highlight the causal roles played by extra-bodily material flows in human practices, the term “material agency” does not sufficiently distinguish cases in which these flows are part of an agentive engagement from cases in which they are not. We propose an operational criterion to effect such a distinction. We claim this criterion is organizational, i.e., systemic, and not causal. In the enactive (...) account, agency requires three organizational conditions: self-individuation, interactional asymmetry, and normativity. These conditions can have organic, sensorimotor, and sociomaterial realizations. The dance of human productive practices is indeed spread between brains, bodies, and the world, as MET claims, but it is distributed in an organized manner that involves constraints and norms at various scales. We put forward a relational and non-anthropocentric perspective toward an enactive approach to productive practices. We discuss some aspects of agentive ensembles rendered more intelligible by our proposal, including incorporation, soft assembly and non-decomposability, and the grounding of teleology normative processes at multiple scales. In this manner, we seek to continue the dialog between MET and enactive theory, beginning with the view that a situated system must realize certain minimal organizational conditions to be called an _agent_. (shrink)

On a traditional view, the semantics of natural language makes essential use of a context parameter, i.e. a set of coordinates that represents the situation of speech. In classical semantic frameworks, this parameter plays two key roles: first, context contributes to determining the content of utterance; second, it is crucial for defining logical consequence. I point out that recent empirical proposals about context shift in natural language (in particular, context-shifting semantics in the style of Anand and Nevins 2004) are incompatible (...) with the traditional view of context. At the same time, there is increasing cross-linguistic support for this brand of context shift. Hence I suggest that context has no place in semantic theory proper. We should revert back to so-called multiple-indexing frameworks that were developed by Montague and others, and relegate context to the postsemantic stage. (shrink)

Suppose that you're certain that a certain sentence, e.g. "Frida is tall", lacks a determinate truth value. What cognitive attitude should you take towards it—reject it, suspend judgment, or what else? We show that, by adopting a seemingly plausible principle connecting credence in A and Determinately A, we can prove a very implausible answer to this question: i.e., all indeterminate claims should be assigned credence zero. The result is striking similar to so-called triviality results in the literature on modals and (...) conditionals. (shrink)

How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer. Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human (...) mind, while developing an alternative picture closer to people's daily experiences. Enactive ideas are applied and extended, providing a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of meaning and agency. The book includes a dynamical systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies; a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery; and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, as well as its implications for embodied subjectivity. Written for students and researchers of cognitive science, the authors offer a fuller view of the mind, a view better attuned to the experiences of people who live, work, love, struggle, and age, thrown into a world of meaningful relations they help create. Additionally, the book is of interest to neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Many recent theories of epistemic discourse exploit an informational notion of consequence, i.e. a notion that defines entailment as preservation of support by an information state. This paper investigates how informational consequence fits with probabilistic reasoning. I raise two problems. First, all informational inferences that are not also classical inferences are, intuitively, probabilistically invalid. Second, all these inferences can be exploited, in a systematic way, to generate triviality results. The informational theorist is left with two options, both of them radical: (...) they can either deny that epistemic modal claims have probability at all, or they can move to a nonstandard probability theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di FerrarisTom BaileyAlfredo Ferrarin, editor. Congedarsi da Kant?: Interventi sul Goodbye Kant di Ferraris. Pisa: ETS, 2006. Pp. 172. Paper, € 13.Maurizio Ferraris’ Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della Critica della ragion pura (Milan 2004) has been a notable success in the field of popular philosophical writing in Italy. With refreshing irreverence and wit, the book mounts a sustained attack on (...) the supposed confusions of Kant’s first Critique, and bemoans their influence on later philosophy. In particular, Ferraris [End Page 328] argues that by attempting to found the necessary features of experience on physics, Kant confuses experience and ontology with science and epistemology and arrives at the implausible conclusion that our experience and knowledge, and perhaps even the existence, of things depend on how our minds are structured. Unsurprisingly, Goodbye Kant! has provoked strong reactions from Kant scholars. Alfredo Ferrarin’s Congedarsi da Kant? collects four particularly considered responses, along with a reply from Ferraris himself.The book begins with Ferrarin’s contribution, which focuses on Ferraris’ claim that, for Kant, the sensible experience of an object necessarily requires a concept of that object. With reference to spatial intuition, the three-fold synthesis, and Kant’s example of a savage seeing a house for the first time, Ferrarin argues that Kant in fact defends the independence of intuition from concepts, such that intuition is possible and can provide certain cognitive results without our having any particular concept of what the object of intuition is. Ferrarin also insists that, in claiming that “[t]he I think must be able to accompany all my representations,” Kant considers having an experience to imply only the possibility—and not, as Ferraris claims, the necessity—of the experience being consciously thought, and that Kant considers imagination not as a “creative” psychological activity within experience, as Ferraris implies, but rather as a certain normative activity that experience presupposes. Instead of basing experience on physics, then, Ferrarin argues that Kant distinguishes experience from science and considers both to be made possible by certain general a priori forms of sensing and conceiving of objects.In the following article, Claudio La Rocca takes issue with Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project in the Critique. For La Rocca, Kant is concerned with the conditions under which discourses or experiences have sense for a subject, and, specifically, with how referring to empirical objects differs from referring to the objects of, say, hallucinations, aesthetic experiences, or moral reasoning. On La Rocca’s account, referring meaningfully to an object presupposes shared rules which identify that kind of object and distinguish it from others, and which are “spelled out” in experience even before being “read” conceptually. However, unlike the distinctions between kinds of empirical objects, the general distinction between empirical objects and objects of other discourses or experiences cannot itself be derived from experience, since experience presupposes it. Thus La Rocca presents Kant’s basic project as the identification of the a priori rules which distinguish empirical objects as such, rather than the idealist project attributed to him by Ferraris, that of showing how the existence or properties of such objects depend on the mind or how our experience of them depends on the concepts or scientific theories we have of them.Paolo Parrini adopts a slightly different approach by arguing that it is Ferraris, and not Kant, who fails to distinguish adequately between experience, ontology, and epistemology. In particular, Parrini insists that, rather than basing experience or ontology on science, as Ferraris claims, Kant aims to show that a priori concepts are necessary to distinguish the objective from the subjective in ordinary experience, and that Ferraris’ own realism naively ignores certain crucial distinctions between what is experienced, what exists, and what we know. Parrini thus undertakes to defend not only Kant, but also certain post-Kantians—and the logical empiricists in particular—against Ferraris’ criticisms.In the final response to Ferraris, Massimo Barale further questions Ferraris’ understanding of Kant’s basic project. By considering only the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, Barale insists that Ferraris treats the most elementary, and even preliminary, parts of Kant... (shrink)

The Russian conquest of Central Asia marked the beginning of record-keeping for Qazaq arbitrators and customary law. It remains obscure how bīs complied with the colonial regulations obliging them to record their court proceedings. I approach this issue first by questioning the utility of extra-judicial sources crafted in Russian at the instigation of colonial bureaucrats; hence, I argue that the comparison alone of ’ādat-related judicial records written in Turki with šarī’a court certificates allows situating the legal terminology applied by Qazaq (...) arbitrators within the discursive tradition of Islamic law. By way of illustrating my approach, I offer a close reading of a report of a murder case adjudicated according to Qazaq customary law in the vicinity of Khiva in 1895. My commentary on the summary of the trial sheds light on the interplay of customary and Islamic law in the region. In addition, it challenges earlier interpretations of the use of the exculpatory oath among the Qazaqs. (shrink)

In this article I suggest that in the Soviet period Central Asians cultivated and conceptualized Islam as an episteme. They did this by reaching beyond alienating categories offered to them by the state. I argue that the constitution of an Islamic culture was made possible, among other things, by Central Asians’ encounters with the past, most notably with what they perceived as an Islamic past. We observe the curious phenomenon of Central Asians’ continuous interaction with the Islamic historical sites that (...) escaped the bulldozers of the Soviet campaigns of religious repression. For some, encounters with the past might be accidental. For many others, the exploration of the past represented a purposive, self-conscious, and reiterated emotional act. I show that Central Asians in the Soviet period—even if at school they were taught little about, and were usually offered a distorted vision of, the Islamic history of their region—were still able to access their past through the surviving architectural presence of Islam. Monumental sites, however, were not enough for Muslims to understand the past and use it to construct their own identity. Such artifacts acquired meaning through an interpretive framework provided by Sufi narratives about saints and their miracles. Therefore, shrines represented for Central Asia a collective memory space, i.e., a place in which the past was preserved for mobilization in the present through narrative. (shrink)

As is made clear by the exergue by Carlo Ginzburg at the beginning of the introduction to the volume, the topic of fakes, forgeries, deceptions, and hoaxes in early modern science touches upon several crucial issues for historians of science, such as the possibilities of disentangling the true from the false in writing history, and to assess criteria of demarcations of truth and falsity in knowledge. Moreover, dealing with fakes also means going beyond rigid disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, the editors Marco (...) Beretta and Maria Conforti underline that the inspirational sources for this book—which has its origins from the Second Watson Seminar in the History of Material and Visual Science held at the Museo Galileo in Florence in June 2013—range from Orson Welles to Trevor Roper’s famous The Hermit of Peking. Consequently, starting from the “rather naïve question” of why, since fakes, forgeries, and deception techniques proliferate in early modern sciences and culture, we still have v .. (shrink)

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. (...) When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine relies on the execution of clinical practice guidelines and protocols. A great deal of of effort has been invested in the development of various tools which automate the representation and execution of the recommendations contained within such guidelines and protocols by creating Computer Interpretable Guideline Models (CIGMs). Context-based task ontologies (CTOs), based on standard terminology systems like UMLS, form one of the core components of such a model. We have created DAML+OIL-based CTOs for the tasks mentioned in the (...) WHO guideline for hypertension management, drawing comparisons also with other related guidelines. The advantages of CTOs include: contextualization of ontologies, providing ontologies tailored to specific aspects of the phenomena of interest, dividing the complexity involved in creating ontologies into different levels, providing a methodology by means of which the task recommendations contained within guidelines can be integrated into the clinical practices of a health care set-up. (shrink)

Using web standards, such as uniform resource identifiers (URIs), XML and HTTP, for naming and describing resources which are not information objects is the key difference between the Web as we know it today and the Semantic Web. Naming and interlinking this type of resources by HTTP URIs (instead of individual constants in a formal language) is the key feature which distinguishes traditional knowledge representation from web-scale knowledge representation. However, this use of URIs brought back attention to the old philosophical (...) problem of identity and reference in a new form. In this paper, we analyze the new version of the problem, provide a formal model for dealing with it when interlinking knowledge on the Web, and argue for the need of a distinction between the use of URIs for describing and accessing resources, and the use of URIs for fixing the reference . We show that in the current practice of linking data these roles are not clearly distinguished, and that this fact may cause unwanted effects and prevent some basic forms of data integration. We also discuss the role of an entity name system as a potential piece of infrastructure for fixing the reference in the Semantic Web. (shrink)

pt. I. Filosofia teoretica.- pt. II. Filosofia morale.

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: While von Glasersfeld’s “epistemological model involves consciousness, memory, and some basic values” , our argument from an enactive perspective is that these axiomatic elements are not atomic and already imply the participation of those social processes they intend to ground and that this fundamental intervention happens before these processes are constituted as knowable by the individual mind they shape.

This interdisciplinary volume brings together expert researchers coming from primatology, anthropology, ethology, philosophy of cognitive sciences, neurophysiology, mathematics and psychology to discuss both the foundations of non-human primate and human social cognition as well as the means there currently exist to study the various facets of social cognition. The first part focusses on various aspects of social cognition across primates, from the relationship between food and social behaviour to the connection with empathy and communication, offering a multitude of innovative approaches (...) that range from field-studies to philosophy. The second part details the various epistemic and methodological means there exist to study social cognition, in particular how to ascertain the proximal and ultimate mechanisms of social cognition through experimental, modelling and field studies. In the final part, the mechanisms of cultural transmission in primate and human societies are investigated, and special attention is given to how the evolution of cognitive capacities underlie primates’ abilities to use and manufacture tools, and how this in turn influences their social ecology. A must-read for both, young scholars as well as established researchers! (shrink)